Virginia Woolfs preoccupation with the metaphysical binary of spiritualism and materialism, viz, the

inner life/ the soul and the body towards the end of Modern Fiction, foregrounds the elevation of the
Russian writers as the ideals of chaotic energy and chastened form in her very own fictional hierarchy.
This is clearly evident in
... if the Russians are mentioned one runs the risk of feeling that to write of any fiction save theirs is waste
of time.

It is certain that Woolf was never interested in the ethical and metaphysical issues that Russian novelists
explored in non-fiction, rather she purely focused on Tolstoy and Dostoevskys attempt to combine
spirituality with almost scientifically crafted realism. There lies the possibility of interpersonal
understanding, where one has the capacity to imagine oneself into other souls, as is evident in Tolstoys
sympathetic engagement with the educated Russian and the peasant equally. This is mainly possible due
the incorporation of their harsher socio-economic reality, resulting in an idyllic, purifying suffering, in
which simplified social relations lead to grand emotional engagements. Woolf notes that it is not possible
with the complexity of the structured English life, where luxury supersedes humanization of common
suffering. This is contrasted in Dostoevskys writings, where everyone, whether noble or simple, a tramp
or a great lady, is equally possessed of a soul worth exploring. Woolf highlights this disconnect between
the English and Russian selves, with an improbable arrangement in a 1919 review, where one would
imagine Dostoevsky inhabiting ones own age, shore, or country village, and how inconceivable it would
be to place the volatile Russian writer on the vicarage lawn of England.

It should be noted that the modernists mainly focused on all forms of self-consciousness: the mind
considering itself, language reflecting upon its material nature, and art questioning its very foundations.
For Woolf, reading foreign literatures similarly involves self-consciousness that involved a language and
cultural divide. The dire need to represent social reality and obliquely express ones emotion and
subjectivity, is clearly indicated in Woolfs views on Dostoevsky: That something that is lost in
translation, the something that cannot be transparently read, is a wonderful description of the modernist
novel.
Here, Russian Literature seemed uniquely different from the pre-modern novels of the 19th Century,
which was why Woolf suggested that it requires a great deal of effort on part of the English reader to read
the same.
The soul is rendered alien to him. It has become antipathetic and formless. With its veering away from
the English logic or the discipline of poetry, so to speak, it borders on bewilderment, as the stories initially
seem inconclusive with no neat conclusions, and thus, we tend to frame a methodological criticism that
the stories should have ended in the ways we are familiar with in which intrigues are exposed, lovers are
united, villains are discomfited as is the case in most Victorian fiction.

One may notice that there is a constant fluctuation in her praise for two virtues of art- truth and beauty. In
her 1918 essay, Woolf clearly points out that Merediths sustained level of beauty in her novels clearly shie
away from the ugliness of the world, prohibiting the inclusion of the poor, the vulgar and the stupid. This
can be contrasted with Russian novelists who in fact, accept ugliness, and in the process, penetrate further
into the human soul, in their undeviating reverence for truth. Whats interesting is that she does not make
a choice in favor of either the Russians or Meredith. Even still, she does clarify that if beauty excludes all
the ugliness in life, it cant be termed as some sort of satisfying beauty.

In The Russian Point of View, Woolf wrote,

... it is the soul that is the chief character in Russian fiction. Delicate and subtle in Tchekov, subject to an
infinite number of humours and distempers, it is of greater depth and volume in Dostoevsky; it is liable to
violent diseases and raging fevers, but still the predominant concern... The novels of Dostoevsky are
seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are
composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round,
blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more
exciting reading.
This, in fact, is what she calls "a new panorama of the human mind", in which there were no clear
dichotomies-there was no "good" or "bad"-no such one or the other- but the two merged as a whole.
Men are at the same time villains and saints; their acts are at once beautiful and despicable. We tend to
love and hate at the same time.